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Roadbed monitoring

As a geotechnical or pavement engineer, you're managing more than materials and specs. You're protecting lives and budgets from what can’t be seen: moisture, salinity, and suction shifts happening below the roadbed. How much failure could you prevent, and how much budget could you protect, if you knew what was happening below the road surface long before it cracked, settled, or flooded? You need tools that accurately measure parameters that impact roadbeds like weather and moisture, so you can uncover underground risk.

Roadbed failures don’t wait for surface signs

Moisture-related pavement degradation begins underground and moves fast. But most monitoring systems don’t track what matters soon enough. Without the right environmental data, you risk:

Subsurface stress going undetected until it’s too late

Costly emergency repairs and disrupted maintenance schedules

Premature wear, cracking, or heaving from salt and moisture movement

Reduced credibility with stakeholders, contractors, and the public

Underground changes don’t follow surface schedules, and you need data that’s just as tough as the environments you work in.

METER’s soil monitoring systems are engineered specifically for long-term deployment beneath critical infrastructure. Built on decades of published research and field-tested durability, our tools help you:

Track soil water content, temperature, suction, and salinity with TEROS 12 and TEROS 21 sensors

Measure changes in electrical conductivity to monitor salt movement

Add surface context with ATMOS 41 weather stations, which capture precipitation, solar radiation, wind, and barometric pressure to help explain subsurface shifts and improve pavement lifecycle modeling

Sync all readings to the cloud with ZL6 loggers and ZENTRA Cloud, giving your team real-time visibility across every segment

Install once. Monitor for years. Respond in time.

Protecting pavement means staying ahead of what’s happening below it. METER gives you a simple, scalable path to permanent monitoring that fits into existing workflows:

Place TEROS sensors beneath your target roadbeds or embankments during construction or retrofit.

Connect to ZL6 and ZENTRA Cloud for automated uploads and real-time alerts.

Track key trends like water movement, salt intrusion, and suction fluctuations, so your team can act before damage surfaces.

Decisions made sooner.

Roads that last longer.

Without early visibility into shifting moisture and salinity beneath the roadbed, you’re left reacting to damage instead of preventing it. When the first signs show up on the surface, the underlying problem has already been at work for weeks, or months:

Emergency interventions and unplanned downtime

Escalating costs due to uncontrolled moisture and salinity

Reputation damage with DOTs, municipalities, and the public

Real-time data keeps roads open, your operations efficient, and your decisions defensible. With METER systems in place:

You catch moisture, salinity, and stress indicators early, before the damage appears

You improve model accuracy and extend pavement life with better decisions

You give your team real-time access to actionable data, no site visit required

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"We run the [ATMOS 41] W’s...and having that pretty close to real time data...we found very attractive to the industry, because they need to make decisions very fast and quick."

Bryce Wuori | CEO and co-founder of Pavewise

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Roadbed monitoring solutions

By the time damage is visible, it’s already too late. Get continuous subsurface monitoring to catch failures early, before damage becomes visible, or dangerous. Explore METER roadbed solutions.

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Roadbed moisture
Weather monitoring
Salinity

Roadbed moisture

Surface failures start below ground. When water infiltrates beneath the road, it doesn’t just disappear—it drives erosion, frost heave, and structural breakdown. To keep roads safe and stable, you need to know exactly how much water is falling, absorbing, and lingering beneath the surface. METER delivers research-grade monitoring of precipitation, soil moisture, and retention dynamics—giving you the data to model risks like flooding and frost damage before they impact performance. Integrated with analysis tools, this insight empowers engineers to take proactive action and extend the life of critical infrastructure.

Volumetric Water Content

Soil suction/water potential

Unsaturated zone moisture and salinity

SOLYX 14 Z

Z See how ZENTRA Cloud can simplify data management

Weather monitoring

Local weather drives long-term roadbed performance. Don’t leave it to chance. Temperature, humidity, wind, and precipitation all impact soil behavior, material performance, and construction safety. METER’s weather monitoring solutions deliver continuous, site-specific data on air temperature, barometric pressure, vapor pressure, wind speed and direction, and more—so you can predict how environmental conditions will affect your materials and your roadbed’s long-term durability. Track critical water-related variables like solar radiation, precipitation, and precipitation electrical conductivity to stay ahead of erosion, frost, and water infiltration risks.

Air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, vapor pressure, wind speed, direction, and gust, solar radiation, precipitation, precipitation EC

ATMOS 41W Z
ATMOS 41 Gen 2 Z

Evapotranspiration

ATMOS 51 Z

Z See how ZENTRA Cloud can simplify data management

Salinity

Salt protects roads—but can quietly destroy what’s beneath them. De-icing agents keep roads safe, but they also introduce long-term risks: corrosion, structural degradation, and environmental damage. Understanding how salts move through water and soil is critical for protecting infrastructure—and everything downstream. METER’s salinity monitoring solutions provide continuous, research-grade measurements of electrical conductivity (EC) in both precipitation and soil moisture. This data helps you mitigate damage from salts and chemicals, inform maintenance strategies, and support efforts to protect groundwater, nearby vegetation, and aquatic systems from harmful runoff.

Water salinity and depth

HYDROS 21 Z

Z See how ZENTRA Cloud can simplify data management

ZL6 Data Logger next to a tablet and several screenshots. the tablet and screenshots show data visualizations from ZENTRA Cloud software

ZENTRA System

Customize your data collection and logging solution by combining multiple METER sensors with the ZL6 Data Logger and ZENTRA Cloud. ZENTRA stores your data in the cloud, allowing easy access to your data and near-real-time reports from all of your data loggers.

Avoid costly field visits by accessing your data from any web-connected device. Analyze it with ZENTRA Cloud’s built-in visualization tools, and easily share insights without tracking down log files on individual computers.

Learn more about ZENTRA

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